Day 70 - Saturday 1 March 2003 - Southampton to Calshot

 7 miles walked today

773 miles walked in total (11.04 average)

The alarm went off at eight o'clock this morning and Sam and I finally got up at 8.40 am.   At this point the weather was fine.  However, twenty minutes later, it was tipping down!  We faffed around for an hour with breakfast and decided to give it a go anyway, so, armed with packed lunches and waterproofs, we set off.

Our journey started with a trip on the Southampton to Hythe ferry, which was very exciting!  Hythe Pier is 700 yards long and was opened on 1 January 1881.   The electric train which runs up and down the pier to meet the ferry has been doing the journey since 1922 and famous passengers include Lawrence of Arabia and King George VI.  We were in excellent company!

From Hythe, we were on roads unfortunately as the paths were all far too boggy due to the torrential rain.  We kept our waterproofs on all day and our style alternated between the drowned rat look and gently steaming when the sun came out.

My boots were giving me a few niggles again, but, being unusually sensible today, I'd packed my old boots in my rucksack so changed them when we came to an open recreation ground, much to the astonishment of the fishermen on the other side of the lake there.

It wasn't long before we were off the main roads and on the quiet roads past Fawley oil refinery and power station down to Calshot beach, where we sat on the beach and ate our lunch in the rain.  We saw (and heard) oyster catchers and watched all the ferries in and out of Southampton to Cowes on the Isle of Wight and beyond.   Considering the weather, there were quite a lot of people about, which was good to see.

When the rain began to get a bit heavier, we decided we ought to make a move so headed out to Calshot Spit and the activity centre.  What a fab place!   We walked in to find about four or five climbing walls, a dry ski slope and a velodrome and hundreds of people attempting each of these obstacles.  Our main priority though was the bar for a cup of tea and the toilets to try and dry ourselves off.

We wanted to head down and look at Calshot Castle (closed until 1 April) but our taxi driver turned up earlier than expected and we were soon on our way back to the car.   Our driver was a mine of information and fed us snippets of local information as we drove back to Hythe.  

In Calshot, there's a road called Tristan Close and this is because of a volcano on the island of Tristan da Cunha.  The residents of this island were moved to Calshot when they were evacuated - this caused Sam and I much pondering as we wondered why on earth they'd come here.  However, we discovered later that a lot of shipping comes to this area from the West Indies, which went some way to explaining this.

As we drove past Fawley power station and oil refinery, our driver told us about an exercise that had been carried out the week previously to counter any terrorist attacks which may happen.  Apparently "if half the army are in Kuwait now, the other half were in Fawley last week"!  Sam was slightly disappointed that she'd missed this excitement and looked quite wistful at the thought of all that khaki!  We were also informed that Fawley power station is manned by only twenty people as it's nearly fully automated and that houses in the Fawley area were a bit cheaper than anywhere else in the area - surprising, that!